Dr. Gisella Perl was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 from Hungary. She lost most of her extended family, including her husband and their only son in the Holocaust. After the war she came to New York City and traveled giving speeches as a witness to the Holocaust. It was Eleanor Roosevelt who convinced her to go back to being a doctor:

In March 1947 she came to this country to speak to doctors and other professionals. ”I went from one town to another, as an ambassador of the six million,” she said. ”One day Eleanor Roosevelt came to the dais and invited me to lunch. I remember saying, ‘Oh, Mrs. President, I cannot come because I am kosher.’ She said, ‘You will have a kosher lunch.’ ”

Mrs. Roosevelt told her, ” ‘Stop torturing yourself; become a doctor again,’ ” she recalled. ”I didn’t want to be a doctor; I just wanted to be a witness.”

As a result of that meeting, Representative Sol Bloom, Democrat of New York, introduced the bill that granted her citizenship, and in 1951 she opened an office in Manhattan, with what she calls ”Sol Bloom furniture.”

”I was the poorest doctor on Park Avenue, but I had the greatest practice; all of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen were my patients,” she said. She also joined the staff of Mount Sinai Hospital and worked for Dr. Alan F. Guttmacher, the family-planning pioneer who was chairman of obstetrics and gynecology. She delivered 3,000 babies in New York and became an expert in treating infertility.

She and her daughter Gabriella, “whom she managed to hide during the war,” moved to Israel in 1979. She died there in 1988 at the age of 81. She lived a good life.